The fierce competition between paleontologists Othniel Marsh and Edward Cope resulted in numerous misidentifications and fraudulent dinosaur reconstructions.
The late 19th-century 'Bone Wars' (1870s-1900) between Marsh and Cope was marked by competitive fossil collecting and sometimes hasty, incomplete descriptions. While errors occurred, notably Cope's Elasmosaurus with its head on the wrong end, these were eventually corrected through peer review and subsequent research. The Bone Wars actually accelerated dinosaur discovery, contributing substantially to our knowledge. Many of Marsh's taxonomic descriptions have proven valid and enduring. This period illustrated how scientific error-correction works through time rather than a permanent staining of the fossil record.